The Nice Guys - Recreating 1970’s Hollywood

It began with a guided tour around Hollywood with producer Joel Silver. We stopped in front of Pink Tacos on the Sunset Strip.

“Look back there, that’s our movie”

Puzzled, I found myself looking at an ugly shopping mall on the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights.

“That used to be The Garden of Allah, and after that a restaurant called ‘The Paradise’ – from that Joni Mitchell song, you know the one. Some days back then you couldn’t see it from here. And THAT’S the old Hollywood we have to recreate in this movie”.

The Paradise doesn’t appear in this movie, but the brief was clear, to recreate an iconic LA, in it’s smoggy days of the late ‘70’s. Many of the landmarks had gone, but we could recreate the feel of the era, the hedonism and glamor that had tipped into sleaze and corruption; the fuel shortages, and lines at the gas stations, and hopefully some iconic landmarks of the time. There was just one problem, and Joel saved it until last:

“Oh, and we’re shooting in Atlanta”.

The script was a a dark and very funny film noir, a mismatched buddy detective caper from Shane Black, the man who made the genre his own from his first movie Lethal Weapon. The story a re-invention of the classic set-up of two private detectives who find themselves looking for a missing girl, and uncover a grand conspiracy that goes all the way to the top of City Hall. Along the way they take in the booming porn industry, after discovering a bizarre fatal accident involving a porn star, 70’s protest movements, and the auto industry, in the final throes of producing their enormous gas-guzzlers, despite the corrosive smog hanging over LA. This was an wide canvas to work on, and also a rare chance to use that forgotten palette that only the 70’s made possible – the oranges, the browns and the yellows.

The problems of recreating LA in Atlanta were apparent from the first scout in Atlanta. For a start, there were trees EVERYWHERE. LA has a very graphic horizon where the sharp outlines of buildings aren’t obscured by greenery, and the sky sits wide above the city. So, every exterior location had to be re-imagined, and wide views could only be achieved with VFX enhancement. For instance, to create the 101 Freeway we found a bridge over railway tracks in downtown Atlanta that I could imagine working as the Hollywood Freeway. I took stills of the location, and our very talented PA, Josh McKevitt, created quick visuals to share with the team, showing how we could make these locations work.

Sometimes we had to see a location as a series of elements for a later VFX composite. Hollywood Boulevard was an iconic sight in the 70’s, and a key setting for the movie. By 1978, when our story is set, it had become the Boulevard broken dreams, and slid into a sleazy parade of sex shops, and porn cinemas. We found a short section of streets on Peachtree Street in downtown (confusingly, there are 400 Peachtree Streets in Atlanta). We were lucky to find the perfect mix of old, undeveloped storefronts, and again re-imagined the location. In the visual I dressed up the storefronts, widened the boulevard, and extended the street beyond.

The Street in downtown Atlanta we used for Hollywood Boulevard

Concept of Hollywood Boulevard by Josh McKevitt

To help recreate the storefronts of the era we had an wealth of research unearthed by my researcher Anna Livia Cullinan. As well as a huge trove of still images, she had also found lots of super-8 films taken by people driving down the boulevard, such as the frame below, taken from a greyhound bus. These proved invaluable for creating an authentic version of the street.

Shooting Hollywood Boulevard in downtown Atlanta

The location process was arduous in Atlanta, but we had two big pieces of luck in finding two key locations. First was managing to find the Porn Producer’s house, where a huge party takes place. Hiding in a large sub-division north of the city a local hip-hop producer had commissioned a scaled-down copy of the famous John Lautner ‘Silvertop’ house, perfect for a ‘70’s party house. Taking my inspiration from Italian interior design of the period, and a large dose of Verner Panton, we set about transforming the all-white interiors. The wonderful set decorator Danielle Berman used Hugh Heffner’s mansion, among others, as inspiration for the bold set dressing in this location. Our talented set designer Sean Jennings fell in love with the references and helped create the authentically ‘70’s party house. The house had almost no straight lines in it, and so much of the construction had to be cut-in on site, despite Sean’s painstaking surveys.

The Sid Shattuck party house

Two particularly tricky problems needed to be solved at this location. Firstly, whilst scouting with Phillipe Rousselot, our DP, neither one of us liked the actual entrance to the house, located to the side of the structure which was cramped and unattractive. The best wide view was from the front driveway, so we decided on making the entrance from there. This required setting paving slabs across the fragile ornamental pond surrounding the front structure. After draining, black carpet was laid into the bed of the pond, and a scaffold structure constructed on spreaders, on which was laid the pattern of cement-textured paving slabs, and lighting posts. The effect was stunning, and well worth the extra effort.

Earth, Wind and Fire playing atop our rooftop stage at the Sid Shattuck location

The second problem was a late request from the producers to find a place for Earth, Wind and Fire, and their huge band, to play at the party. There was only one place they could be seen, which was on the roof of the adjacent bedroom block. The flat roof would never hold the weight, and was easily damaged, so the only solution was to build a roof above it, which was discreetly supported from the ground. Given the resources we had for this location, it was a major undertaking, but Marlow Sanchez, our construction coordinator, found a fast and cost effective solution, spreading wooden I-beams across, supported on steel tube goalposts, and crisis was averted.

Interior Sid Shattuck party house

We wanted the party scenes to have a fractured and dislocated feel to them, so I designed a lot of mirrors and cutouts into these sets on both the walls built into the location, and a series of mirrored screens we used as mobile foreground pieces. The fireplace alone had hundreds of plexi mirrors cut by CNC and glued onto pyramid domes which hid any camera reflections. The effect of the reflections with the crowded party was spectacular.

The second piece of location luck was in finding an authentic 70’s hotel in the city, that was also happy to welcome a shooting crew for a number of weeks. The Hilton in downtown Atlanta was built in 1976, and t’s interior hadn’t been significantly updated since then, and made a perfect setting for the story finale.

Our story climaxes at the opening party of the 1978 LA Car Show which takes place at the hotel. As well as building elevator lobbies, bars, restaurants, and hotel suites built into the hotel’s fabric, we also built a large set of the car show on their pool deck. Our other talented set designer, Mayumi Konishi-Valentine, undertook to re-create the colorful, tinsel world of the ‘70’s car show. For inspiration we used stills from the car shows of the period in LA, Chicago and Detroit. We uprooted the two tennis courts on the deck to build the car exhibits, but the major problem to overcome at the location was what to do with the large, ugly gazebo that covered much of the pool deck. Again, I used plexi mirror, such a favored material in the era, to entirely cover the underside of the structure, and create a striking double image when shooting from underneath.

1978 LA Auto Show created on the terrace of the Atlanta Hilton

The auto show display was a large set for our relatively modest resources, and we had little money to spend on building a background around the set, to hide some of the urban ugliness beyond. Much od the perimeter was enclosed with fabric banners in ‘70’s oranges, yellows and reds, drawn directly from photos of the 1978 Chicago motor show. The back wall of the set still needed treatment, and the solution came from art director David Utley, who suggested renting zip-up facades frequently used in exhibition design. We found a perfect ‘70’s design, and they even came ready to be lit from inside.

To create an authentic period world a huge amount of effort was put into the graphics. It was such a broad range of styles that needed to be covered, from newspapers and magazines, to porn posters with period illustrations. All this was covered with style by our in-house graphic designer Jason Sweers, who also handled the large-scale designs for the seventie’s Bowling Alley, that were realized as giant wallpapers to transform the location.

However, two particular aspects needed special attention, and specialized artists. There were the center-spread photos of our porn star character, In addition were the porn movie poster illustrations, which would appear on locations, the party house, and finally as a giant billboard near the end of the movie.

For the center-spread photography we discovered Arny Freytag, one of the main Playboy center-spread photographers in the 1970’s. The photos were crucial, as they would appear in magazines in the story, but also in huge playing cards set out at the party scenes, as part of Shane’s idea for a ‘Through the Looking Glass’ theme. Of course the shoot required a small, fully dressed set, on a stills stage back in LA, art directed by Miranda Cristofani. I never imagined in my career I would be able to boast of designing a set for a porn stills shoot, and I might still have to keep it from my parents.

The illustrations on many of the movie posters of the era are illustrations of amazing skill and quality, and as I soon discovered, couldn’t be replicated by any contemporary concept artists; I needed an expert. After a great deal of searching I found an illustrator in New Zealand, Gerad Taylor, who specialized in glamor illustration and whose work was matched the style of the posters we had to create. Using references and photoshop’d layouts we sent over to him, he skillfully realized the images, which despite their content were quite beautiful illustrations. You can only imagine the clearance issues we had with these, which went on for weeks, and only ended when I spoke from location to a clearance lawyer, the night before the first images were to appear on set.

One of Gerad Taylor’s glamour illustrations

One of the nerve-wracking problems of shooting our LA exteriors after our main shoot in Atlanta was having to design and build interior sets with no confirmed locations for the exterior. Shane had Russel Crowe’s character, Healy, living above the old Comedy store on Sunset Strip. As one of the first sets to shoot on stage in the schedule, I had to design and build this set before we had even scouted or confirmed the actual location in back in LA. As this set was never seen directly from outside there was some latitude, and we even built the backing beyond the windows rather than use a translight, to get some life into the neighboring building.

Healy’s living space was an interesting mix of an old office space that he had made into a long-term temporary apartment. Danielle Berman dressed the set as an office, and then pushed it aside to create Healy’s living space amongst it.

Concept of Healy’s apartment by Matthias Beeguer

Ryan Gosling’s March character lived in a rented house, that we decided would be a classic mid-century style, partly for the way spaces flow together so well in those houses, and allowed the scenes to be played fluidly. We had a location in Baldwin Hills that we had scouted, but was still not confirmed by the time I designed and built our set, so we had to pray to the film gods that our exteriors on stage would match. We had even had photos taken of the view beyond the backyard made into a 120’ translight to match the location. Of course, the translight image had to be treated in photoshop to give it the correct period look of LA, which was a brownish orange haze that permanently hung over the city.

March’s house was also a feast of different period wallpapers. I needed to use papers from different periods to give a sense of history to the house, so the patterns in the living room were mainly 1960’s designed papers, while the bold floral design we used for the girl’s bedroom was pure mid-seventies. Strangely, this paper acted on some people on set like smell does on the memory, and one look of it took them straight back to vivid memories of their childhood. Sand had to design and manufacture ourselves. For example, having created the wall and floor scheme with Danielle, we couldn’t find tiles that matched the style and boldness of the room. Instead I made a tile design, which we had printed, complete with grout lines, that matched perfectly. Vintage papers are always difficult to find in quantity and at reasonable cost, and we quickly exhausted ebay and US sources, and I ended up purchasing lots of papers from contacts in Europe.

March’s house set built on stage in Atlanta

The other main exterior we built on stage was perhaps the most fun. Shane wanted to open the movie with a truly iconic LA image, so I showed him photos of the Hollywood sign in 70’s, that tragic, ruined emblem of what the city at the time. This was finally realized as a VFX shot, using 3D drawings we created of the sign, but or some time we planned to build the letters in 1/6th scale to shoot in camera.

Cut to the interior of a house in the Hollywood Hills, and a boy is sneaking back to his room with a girlie mag stolen from his parents bedroom. Suddenly BOOM! A sky blue rans Am Firebird crashes right through the house just behind him, and out the other side.

We started the scene on a location in Atlanta, then cut to our stage set, built mostly three sided, to give space for tracking camera angles. Into the floor traps were cut for other camera positions, and one camera behind a hinged wall that dropped before it could register a shot. T was nerve-wracking to know we only had one take on this set, before it was destroyed, but everything went like clockwork. The effect was spectacular and shocking – Just the right opening sequence for the story.

After finishing in Atlanta, we could finally pick up on exteriors in LA. Most of the shooting here involved dressing locations to some degree. We used City Hall for the scene of a smog protest, and shot along the Strip, including the Comedy Club. The last significant set we built was the site of a burned-out house, once home and office of the editor of the stolen porn movie at the center of the story.

Concept of burnt out house by Matthias Beeguer

In the same way that some of the best ideas appear when you’re not looking for them, so the best locations can appear when you’ve given up looking, and are driving around lost. That was how we found the perfect location of a vacant lot set in a row of small suburban cottages, with palms running down the street, hills behind, and a network of small streets that worked beautifully for the scene. Onto the vacant lot we had union shop Allsets build a beautiful burned-out frame of a house, sing a patented recipe for burn crackling. The set was so convincing we had a police cruiser stop by to investigate.

What began with a tour around Hollywood finally ended on the Sunset Strip between the Comedy Store and the House of Blues, where we shot our final scene. Our journey took us deep into some of the city’s recent history, and it’s unique sub-cultures, and pushed to the limit how much of LA could be found in Atlanta.